If Looks Could Thrill

That moment when you hear something and you know it’s good … it may just be Vanic.

Vanic of Vancouver is a natural master of his idiom: making the best dubstep/trap sounds around.

He just released a great new collab with K.Flay, “Make Me Fade“, which is on his SoundCloud. But their combo from a couple months ago, “Can’t Sleep” is still great, a perfect expression of the sort of freedom that this sort of music is supposed to engender. He achieves this by building a tension in the music and the lyrics that remind one of the stress of the day (“I been runnin’ runnin’ runnin’ all day”), which finally breaks in a perfect crescendo, coalescing in an undulating wave of joy.

Sure, lots of songs are constructed like this. But, Vanic’s magic.

Last month’s “Hypnotic” with Zella Day is another example. It captures all the tropes of hot-right-now — sultry, dripping lyrics about the sensual mundanity of modern life overlaid on a beat that captures effectively and repeatedly the elemental power of losing oneself in something greater than oneself: “You make me feel like someone else / You got me talkin’ in my sleep / I don’t wanna come back down / I don’t wanna touch the ground / Hypnotic taking over me…”

The bass moves at the perfect pace, keeping a foundation of calm upon which the truth of the music’s madness is free to roam.

And that’s the place where Vanic plays.